Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

24 June 2007

More Wertenbaker

There is a Vegas post to come, but I don't have time for it right now and I wanted to share a little bit from the book I finished on the plane today. It's Timberlake Wertenbaker's second volume of plays published by Faber & Faber and it includes the plays The Break of Day, After Darwin, Credible Witness, The Ash Girl and a radio play called Dianeira. Some of my favorite moments:

From The Break of Day
Tess: What's feminism for if we still hate each other?
Nina: It's a peace treaty not a love feast.

From After Darwin
Millie: I still can't believe in generosity without idealism.
Tom: That's because you're homophobic. How do you think we survive?

From Credible Witness
Petra: When we give birth to our sons, we hold them more tightly than our daughters, we tremble when they're sick, we would die to protect them, but then we ask them to be men. Our history tells us to make sons that will fight—if that's not right, what have we been doing for hundreds of years?

From Dianeira
Irene: It could go on, this argument, but in the end, fathers do eat their sons if they can, there is no other myth that rings so true. I know you young people like to think differently, but you give yourselves the illusion of too much power. You do what your fathers tell you in the end, one way or the other, even now, you'll die by their order. . . . And now the long arm of Heracles bows down the head of his son and turns this young man full of hope and life and possible love into a man overflowing with resentment, anger. And so it continues.

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